A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field.

"Follow your passion" might just be terrible advice.

Most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

Self-Determination Theory tells us that motivation requires that you fulfill 3 basic psychological needs: Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important; Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do; Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people.

Working right trumps finding the right work.

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.

I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can’t ignore you.

The traits that define great work are rare and valuable.

Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital.

The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming "so good they can’t ignore you", is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. 

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration.

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an "acceptable level."

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.

To summarize, if your goal is to love what you do, your first step is to acquire career capital. Your next step is to invest this capital in the traits that define great work. Control is one of the most important targets you can choose for this investment.

Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable.

The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.

"If you’re struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea."

Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.

Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a "big" action.

To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.

If career capital makes it possible to identify a compelling mission, then it’s a strategy of little bets that gives you a good shot of succeeding in this mission.

The Law of Remarkability: For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.

The core idea of this book is simple: To construct work you love, you must first build career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the type of traits that define compelling careers. Mission is one of those traits.

I argued that the best ideas for missions are found in the adjacent possible—the region just beyond the current cutting edge.

Rule #1: Don't follow your passion. Rule #2: Be so good they can't ignore you by acquiring enough career capital with rare and valuable skills. Rule #3: Cash in your career capital by gaining Control and other traits that make great work. Rule #4: Think small, act big - the importance of missions.

I'm very private in person. I'm very sensitive and shy with men individually. But when I'm talking, maybe there's this other channel or this other side and other way of working in my mind, and I convert and become carefree.

I used to say to myself, 'Well, in the old days everybody danced because they loved to dance, and there was none of this professional garbage going on about how much can you get for this or that or the other, or any of the kinds of things that insecurity can sometimes promote. Sometimes it's for the wrong reasons.'

I haven't inherited the earth from my parents, I am borrowing it from my children.

We're not show-business people. We have a life.

You can find dozens of books about people taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad. I knew I had to do something different to cross Siberia. To drive and to talk with people along the way, that was how I wrote my book 'Great Plains'. I drove and camped in Siberia, but did not have a real program.

What I wear is constantly evolving. I am really big on comfortable clothes. I love soft, loose-fitting clothing that has some edge or something new/fresh to it.

Handouts are not going to end global poverty, but work - real work - just might.

By God, when you see your beauty you will be the idol of yourself.

This film is what it is. It's a campy thriller horror movie where you go and have fun. With these types of films, you can't take it too seriously. They are what they are.

I want to see a world in which every entrepreneur has access to the resources he or she needs to succeed, and where through the power of supportive communities - that means you and me - every resource can be made available.

You just need a good plan and then a back-up plan!

I went to school with Steven Wright, who was the shyest guy I knew, and one day someone suddenly told me that he was in a club doing standup comedy. I went down to his club and he was great. Another friend of mine, who was pretty much a thief by trade, was hosting the show. So I thought, 'If these guys can do it, then so can I.'

When I was a kid, there were no credit cards. Instead, retailers offered layaway plans. My mom would go to a store, such as a furniture outlet, choose the sofa she wanted, and put it on layaway. That meant she put a little money down to hold the sofa, and every payday she'd pay a little toward the purchase.

Going to any loud place is terrible for me. I'm bad at loud restaurants.

The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.

In France you cannot not have lunch. If you stopped the French from having lunch, you will have a second revolution, I can tell you this. Not going to work - it is part of the French privilege.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

The company without a strategy is willing to try anything.

A snowball is simple, direct and familiar to most of us. I use this simplicity as a container for feelings and ideas that function on many levels.

But if you put a script up in front of me to read, or a cue card, I couldn't do it without stuttering.

People come to L.A. because they're chasing that dream of a better life. That's why I came here, because I thought it would be a place where I would find other people like me; people who wanted to write, people who had a dream of being something else. And that proved to be true.

I swear to God I was freaked out about the Aswang when I was a kid in the Philippines.

Central banks need to be able to buy bonds if there are short-term malfunctions of the markets. But buying bonds without differentiation and without limits would be very problematic.